Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, companies utilizing e-commerce websites often do not have a physical store or location where a salesperson can help both novice and knowledgeable customers find sought-after products. Instead, a customer navigating an e-commerce website typically attempts to identify a product that meets the customer's needs. Even a customer with considerable experience navigating e-commerce websites sometimes experiences difficulty in choosing a product from among tens or hundreds of similar products. For novice customers, meanwhile, the task of shopping online via the web can be unproductive and even frustrating. In response to these difficulties, these companies continually strive to make their e-commerce websites more dynamic, compelling, informative, and easier for users to navigate and locate products and related information. One way to improve a customer's experience includes providing forums (or discussion boards) that allow customers to exchange information with other people via dialogue in a discussion. The ever-enlarging product catalog makes forums helpful when a customer tries to distinguish between products, seek out impartial advice, learn more about a product or category, or obtain other information.
One way of creating forums is through selection of forum topics by an editor or administrator. However, this approach is inherently burdensome for an editor, particularly when the editor supports a large product catalog. For example, each forum may require manual creation and placement of the forum at useful locations throughout a website to provide adequate customer accessibility to the forums. A large product catalog may support tens of thousands of forums and thus require intensive manual interactions by an editor to maintain optimally placed forums within the website.
Accordingly, among other potential improvements, there remains a need to improve forum creation and placement on e-commerce websites.